The Grandiose Self Against the Gravity of Power | Gen Z Series – Part VI

In the recent Gen Z protests in Nepal, many people felt that something about the atmosphere was unusually charged. The speed at which crowds formed, the intensity of confrontations, and the sudden shifts from peaceful gathering to explosive anger seemed strikingly familiar to anyone watching youth-led uprisings around the world. A similar emotional sharpness was visible during the 2020 global protests, the farmers’ movement in India, the student demonstrations in Chile, and climate marches across Europe.

Across these events, one pattern stands out: young protesters are not only fighting over real political and economic grievances, but they are engaging with authority in a way that feels faster, more volatile, and more emotionally amplified than in earlier generations. The question is—what changed? The answer may lie not just in their social conditions, but in the digital worlds carried constantly in their pockets.

The argument is provocative but increasingly difficult to dismiss: social media addiction is perhaps cultivating a narcissistic, grandiose sense of self among users—especially Generation Z—that fundamentally distorts their relationship with power, reality, and frustration. This digital transformation of the psyche may be priming young people for sudden eruptions of anger and what we might call “viral violence” during protests. To understand this phenomenon, we need to explore how social media has collapsed traditional power distances, created illusory control, and ultimately disconnected a generation from the psychological resilience that comes from navigating reality’s inevitable constraints.

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Table of Contents

• • The Collapse of Power Distance

  • The Curated Self and Digital Mirroring

  • The Illusion of Control and the Sadomasochistic Dynamics

  • Collective Narcissism and the Loss of Frustration Tolerance

  • The Reality Gap and Protest Violence

  • The Spectacle of Violence and Digital Validation

  • Toward Understanding, Not Condemnation

In traditional societies, power operated through distance. The king lived in a castle. The celebrity remained behind velvet ropes. The politician appeared only on carefully staged occasions. The distance demanded patience, self-regulation, and an acknowledgment of one’s limited place within a larger social hierarchy. It taught people to negotiate with authority slowly, through layers of protocol and social cues, cultivating humility, restraint, and the capacity to tolerate frustration.

This gap protected the psyche from the illusion of instant influence; it reminded individuals that power was something approached gradually, not something one could simply reach out and touch. Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede identified “power distance” as a fundamental dimension of culture: the extent to which less powerful members of society accept and expect unequal power distribution. High power distance cultures feature clear hierarchies; low power distance cultures emphasize equality.

Power distance could be useful, but only up to a point. Its value depends on how much of it exists and how flexible it is. When power distance is too high, people may feel oppressed, stuck, or pressured to obey without question. When it is too low, society can become confusing and chaotic, with everyone feeling equally entitled to argue, challenge, or demand control. The healthiest societies find a moving balance between the two: enough hierarchy to create order and stability, but enough openness to allow people to move upward, speak freely, and introduce new ideas. When this balance is achieved, power distance creates a sense of structure that feels supportive rather than suffocating—providing guidance without harshness and authority without domination.

But social media has introduced something unprecedented: the illusion of low power distance while maintaining actual high power inequality. When a teenager follows Elon Musk on Twitter or comments on a celebrity’s Instagram post, they experience a psychological sensation of proximity and access. The celebrity appears in their palm, in intimate settings—morning coffee, casual workout clothes, unfiltered thoughts. As sociologist Joshua Meyrowitz observed in his prescient book “No Sense of Place”, electronic media erode the boundaries between front-stage and back-stage behavior, making authority figures seem more accessible and “real.”

“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously declared. On social media, the message is: everyone is within reach. You can @-mention the president. You can reply to your idol’s midnight thoughts. You can participate in live streams where celebrities answer questions in real-time. This creates what we might call a “democracy of attention”—anyone can theoretically capture anyone else’s notice.

But here’s the psychological trap: this perceived closeness is fundamentally asymmetrical and illusory. The celebrity has millions of followers; you have hundreds. They shape culture; you react to it. Yet the interface design deliberately obscures this asymmetry. Everyone has the same sized profile picture, the same character limits, the same commenting capabilities. The open, egalitarian design of social media flattens visual and interactive cues of power difference.

Jacques Lacan’s idea of the “mirror stage” can help us understand what happens psychologically on social media. In Lacan’s original theory, a baby looks into a mirror and mistakes the unified reflection for its true self, even though internally it still feels chaotic and uncoordinated. This misrecognition becomes the foundation of the child’s ego—it begins to think of itself in terms of the polished image, not the messy reality. Something similar happens online. The ordinary user, who in the real world has almost no access to powerful figures, suddenly feels close to them through likes, comments, livestreams, and casual behind-the-scenes posts. Even though the actual distance—social, economic, political—is enormous, the digital environment makes it feel small.

The user starts to believe that this closeness is real, that they share the same stage, the same visibility, even the same influence. In truth, this is a misrecognition: a confusion between symbolic proximity and actual power. But over time, this illusion becomes emotionally convincing, shaping how the user sees themselves and the world. Just as the child builds its identity around the mirror image, the social media user begins building a sense of self around a distorted feeling of influence, relevance, and access. And this, in turn, changes how they respond to frustration, authority, and the limits of real life, because the self they now defend is partly built on illusion.

Every day, billions of people curate their digital selves: selecting photos, crafting captions, choosing which moments merit documentation. This isn’t mere vanity—it’s identity work in the digital age. But unlike previous forms of self-presentation, social media creates a persistent, quantified external mirror of the self.

The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote extensively about the “dialogical” nature of identity—we become ourselves through recognition by others. Historically, this recognition happened in limited, concrete communities where feedback was immediate, embodied, and reality-tested. If you claimed to be brave but acted cowardly, your community knew. If you presented yourself as generous but behaved selfishly, the contradiction was visible.

Social media disrupts this reality-testing mechanism. You can curate an image of adventurousness while rarely leaving your room, of political commitment while taking no concrete action, of deep friendship while maintaining only shallow connections. More critically, the feedback you receive—likes, shares, comments—validates the curated image, not the actual self. As psychologist Jean Twenge documents in iGen, rates of narcissism have risen significantly among young people, correlating strongly with social media usage.

The psychiatrist Otto Kernberg, a leading theorist of narcissistic personality organization, emphasizes that pathological narcissism develops partly from a lack of realistic mirroring in childhood—when caregivers reflect back an grandiose image rather than the child’s actual capabilities and limitations. Social media arguably creates a cultural-scale version of this dynamic. The platform’s algorithms reward grandiosity—outrageous claims get engagement, moderate positions get ignored, extreme self-confidence attracts followers.

But beneath the grandiose self, narcissism theorists tell us, lies profound fragility. The narcissistic personality structure is actually a defense against deep-seated feelings of worthlessness and shame. This explains a puzzling paradox: why do digital natives, who present such confident self-images online, also report record levels of anxiety and depression? The answer may be that they’re maintaining two irreconcilable versions of self—the grandiose digital persona and the inadequate feeling actual person.

Consider this scenario, increasingly common: a celebrity makes a mildly controversial statement. Within hours, coordinated online campaigns emerge. Hashtags trend. Screenshots circulate. The celebrity issues an apology or doubles down. Either way, they’ve responded to the crowd. The online mob has demonstrated power.

This dynamic introduces something genuinely new in the history of power relations. In pre-digital times, the average person had essentially no direct influence over celebrities or political leaders. You might vote once every few years, or write a letter that would likely never be read. But you couldn’t coordinate with millions of others instantly to apply immediate pressure. You couldn’t make someone “trend” or become “canceled.”

Social media offers tools of collective power: viral campaigns, coordinated hashtags, mass commenting, public shaming. These tools create a sense of agency—users feel they can affect powerful people. Sometimes they actually can. Careers have been ended, apologies extracted, policies changed through social media pressure.

But here’s where the sadomasochistic dynamic emerges—a term that sounds dramatic but carries specific psychological meaning. In Freudian and post-Freudian thought, sadomasochism isn’t primarily about physical pain but about the erotics of power, domination, and submission. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in “Coldness and Cruelty”, argued that masochism involves a peculiar contract: the masochist actually controls the scenario by dictating the terms of their own domination.

Something similar happens in parasocial relationships on social media. Fans simultaneously worship celebrities (submission) and demand that celebrities perform for them, respond to them, acknowledge them (domination). When celebrities refuse or disappoint, the adoring can instantly flip to vicious. The same accounts that post “I love you!” can within hours be leading harassment campaigns.

This isn’t simple hypocrisy—it’s the inevitable tension of a relationship structured around impossible proximity. The user simultaneously wants to be noticed by the celebrity (which requires the celebrity’s elevated status) and to control the celebrity (which would eliminate that status). They want their idol to remain on a pedestal but also to step down and interact as an equal. These contradictory desires create a perpetual state of frustration that can explode into aggression.

Psychologically, this might trigger what Heinz Kohut called “narcissistic rage”—the furious response when the environment fails to provide expected mirroring or idealization. If you’ve built your sense of self partly around imagined proximity to powerful figures, their indifference or rejection feels like a profound wound to identity itself.

The concept of “collective narcissism” offers a crucial bridge between individual psychology and group behavior. Developed by psychologists including Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, collective narcissism describes an emotional investment in an unrealistic belief in the greatness of one’s in-group, accompanied by hypersensitivity to threats and a constant need for external validation.

Traditionally, collective narcissism attached to conventional groups: nations, ethnicities, religions. But social media enables the formation of identity groups around increasingly granular categories—fandoms, ideological micro-tribes, aesthetic communities. Each becomes a potential site of collective narcissistic investment. And crucially, each operates in an environment of instant feedback and apparent consensus.

When you post something on social media and it receives immediate validation—likes, shares, affirming comments—you experience what behavioral psychologists call intermittent reinforcement at an unprecedented frequency. This is the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. But unlike slots, social media combines this reinforcement with identity formation and social belonging.

The psychoanalyst Christopher Lasch, in his prescient 1979 book “The Culture of Narcissism”, argued that modern consumer capitalism cultivates narcissistic personality structures by promising instant gratification while simultaneously creating conditions of deep insecurity. Social media intensifies both sides of this equation. The promise: viral fame is always one post away, everyone can be an influencer, your thoughts matter to thousands. The insecurity: you’re only as relevant as your last post, younger competitors are always emerging, algorithms can make you invisible overnight.

This environment is particularly toxic for developing what psychologists call “frustration tolerance”—the capacity to handle delayed gratification, ambiguity, and disappointment. The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott emphasized that healthy development requires “good enough” parenting that includes appropriate frustration. The infant must gradually learn that needs aren’t met instantly, that other people have their own perspectives, that reality imposes limits.

But what happens when a generation grows up in digital environments where communication is instant, gratification (through likes and engagement) comes within seconds, dissatisfaction can be immediately expressed and often receives validation, algorithms curate reality to match existing preferences, and echo chambers of the digital spaces insulate one from meaningful challenge? The result may be a cohort with dramatically reduced frustration tolerance and an inflated sense of their own importance and power. This isn’t moral failure—it’s predictable developmental outcome.

This brings us to the streets. When young people socialized primarily through social media encounter traditional power structures during protests, they experience what we might call a “reality gap”—a jarring disconnect between the illusory power they’ve experienced online and their actual powerlessness offline.

In digital space, they can make things “trend,” can get responses from celebrities, can coordinate massive campaigns, can see their ideas spread across networks. There’s an intoxicating sense that change happens through attention, virality, and collective will expressed through clicks and shares.

But at a protest, facing police or political authorities, those digital power tools don’t work. The police don’t care about hashtags. Politicians can’t be @-mentioned into compliance. The asymmetry of power—always illusory online—becomes viscerally, physically real. You can’t “cancel” a police line. You can’t make a political decision “go viral” out of existence.

For someone with a grandiose sense of self and collective power, this confrontation with actual powerlessness is deeply destabilizing. The narcissistic structure, with its fragile core, can respond to such challenges with “narcissistic rage”—an intensity of fury that seems disproportionate to observers but makes psychological sense when understood as a defense against existential threat to the self-concept.

Moreover, the collective narcissism cultivated online creates expectations of immediate, total victory. Social media movements can seem to achieve change overnight—a company apologizes, a person is fired, a statement is retracted. This creates an expectation that political and social change should happen with similar speed. When it doesn’t—when bureaucracies move slowly, when negotiations are protracted, when compromise is necessary—the response is not patience but outrage.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote about “liquid modernity”—a state where solid institutions and structures melt away, where everything is temporary, flexible, and immediate. Social media accelerates this liquidity. But politics, law, and social change remain stubbornly solid, slow, and incremental. The collision between liquid expectations and solid reality generates tremendous frustration and anger.

There’s another dimension worth considering: protest violence itself has become content. Hannah Arendt, in “On Violence”, draws a sharp line between power and violence, two concepts people often confuse. Power, she argues, comes from people acting together—when a group is united, organized, and able to move collectively toward a common goal. Violence, however, is different: it is essentially an individual force that relies on tools, weapons, or brute physical action. It does not require agreement or collective will.

Arendt’s key insight is that violence usually appears when power is weakening. When a group feels it no longer has real influence, or when authorities fear they are losing legitimacy, violence erupts as a kind of desperate replacement. It tries to achieve by force what no longer seems achievable through collective strength. So for Arendt, violence is not an extension of power—it is what fills the void when power fails.

Social media has added a new element: the spectacular potential of violence. Dramatic confrontations generate views, shares, and engagement. The most peaceful protest may get limited coverage, but broken windows and clashes with police go viral. This creates a perverse incentive structure where violence becomes a form of communication optimized for platform algorithms.

For individuals socialized to understand impact through metrics—views, likes, shares—violent protest can unconsciously be understood as “content creation.” This isn’t to say protesters are cynically performing violence for clicks, but rather that the grammar of social media—where visibility equals importance, where virality equals impact—may unconsciously shape tactical choices.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argues that modern life has reached a point where we no longer experience the world directly; instead, we encounter it through images, screens, and curated representations. Rather than engaging with people, events, or realities as they are, we interact with their visual versions—advertisements, media narratives, photographs, social feeds, and staged performances. Over time, these representations begin to feel more real than lived experience itself.

Debord’s point is that the “spectacle” doesn’t just show us the world—it replaces the world, shaping our desires, beliefs, and sense of reality. We start living through what is displayed to us rather than what we genuinely experience, making images the dominant medium through which reality is constructed and understood. Today, the spectacle has become participatory—everyone produces it through their smartphones, and everyone consumes it through their feeds. Protest violence becomes simultaneously political action and content production, resistance and performance.

This analysis might seem to lay blame at the feet of young protesters or to dismiss legitimate grievances. That would be a profound misreading. The point isn’t that Gen Z protesters are simply narcissistic or that their causes lack merit. Many of the issues driving global youth movements—climate catastrophe, economic inequality, democratic backsliding—are urgent and real.

Rather, the argument is that social media has created psychological and social conditions that shape how political grievances are experienced and expressed. It is entirely possible to hold several truths at once: young people today face real and urgent problems that justify protest; at the same time, social media has altered their relationship to power, identity, and frustration in ways that can make sudden or violent eruptions more likely; and critically, these shifts are not signs of individual pathology but understandable responses to a technological environment that accelerates emotion, collapses distance, and reshapes how people imagine their agency.

The philosopher Charles Taylor argued that we need to understand people’s actions within their “social imaginary”—the implicit background of assumptions about how society works. Gen Z’s social imaginary has been fundamentally shaped by social media in ways that previous generations’ were not. This isn’t their fault, but it has consequences we need to understand.